Authors Tone: The Use Of Words And Phrases In Poetry - Essay Example

The first few lines of the poem give a feeling that the writer is in awe of the fact that people have sex without being emotionally attached to each other through a bond of love. The lines ‘Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice’, show through the writers choice of words how she perceives sex without love as a show between two people who are performing a beautiful art, to which she gives the simile of dancing and ice skating. But at the same time, the use of ice depicts that the feeling that comes off it must be cold.

So the writer, in the short span of a few lines, gives the reader impressions of amazement and amusement. She also shows a clear admiration of the beauty of the act itself but gives a clear indication of how such an act cannot be a complete satisfaction. It would be a cold-hearted union, according to the tone of the lines of the poem, of two bodies and it would be nothing much more than that. Olds uses vivid imagery with the lines ‘faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away’, the underlying tone underneath this imagery seems to reduce the lovers to mere pieces of meat with each being used by the other for their own pleasure.

The writer seems to be suggesting that sex without love can be for physical satisfaction and comfort which requires the presence of two bodies, two pieces of flesh, the existence of any feelings is rendered unnecessary.